Minutes from March 18 Meeting
Summary of Meeting in Kyoto Saturday March 9: Maury Goodman and Steve Geer
There was a meeting on March 9 in Kyoto to discuss the forming of the
JHF to SuperK collaboration. There were about 30 people at the meeting:
6 from Japan, 10 from Europe, 15 from the US (including Steve Geer,
Maury Goodman, and Kevin McFarland, "regulars" from this study group) ,
2 from Canada, 2 from Korea.
There was no one there from China or Germany, although some interest from
those countries has been expressed.
Right now the neutrino program is not part of "Phase I" of the Japanese
Hadron Facility, but is in Phase II. They would like the neutrino program
to be redefined as part of phase I, but to do that they need a
more substantial list of collaborators and some sort of idea of the
funding profile. The group is hoping for external funds to cover roughly
1/3 of the total cost of the neutrino program,
while they would get support from Japan for the other 2/3.
The collaboration is expected to be twice the size of SuperK, or very
roughly 120 people. At the meeting there was more interest expressed in
the European group in the near water cerenkov detector, and the US group
expressed more interest in the near fine-grained detector.
Steve Geer mentioned that they are looking for a lot of help with the
beamline: all aspects, from the proton beam optics which include
superconducting dipoles and quads, to fast extraction, to the target
and the horns.
The way we should be thinking about our studies now is "How does this
experiment contribute, given the presence of the JHF experiment and
sensitivity?"
Steve Geer and Kevin McFarland had a meeting with Mike Witherell
to discuss what they learned at the JHF meeting, and to that end Mike
said that the earliest we could conceivably get any base funds would be
in FY2005. But to get any funds at all we need to reach a consensus in
the community on what measurements are important, where they should be done,
and we need a roadmap on how to get there from here. We should NOT be in
the game of just trying to figure out what looks like the best thing to do
in a vacuum, we should figure out what makes the most sense given the JHF
experiment...how best can we contribute there, and is there something we
can propose to do that would be a good "next step", say, after JHF to SuperK?
(Or concurrent).
Scott Menary said that another thing mentioned at the Kyoto meeting was
a "deadline" of May 9--they don't want financial commitments by then, but
they do want letters of intent to join the collaboration. They also
don't need a list of people per institution, but maybe a list of institutions,
and a PI for each institution.
Slides from Peter Shanahan
http://home.fnal.gov/~shanahan/studies/mtg_031802.ps
Peter Shanahan gave a talk as a follow-up discussion from last week's
presentation by Fritz--because PBEAM doesn't include secondary interactions
of the produced pions, and because the hadron production model was tuned
for higher energy incoming protons, the neutrino flux at 2GeV as a
function of incoming proton momentum does NOT agree with the geant simulation
which of course does have reinteractions. So while the neutrino
flux at 120GeV proton beam agrees fairly well between pbeam and geant,
it doesn't agree as well for 40GeV proton beam. Peter agreed to come with
a scale factor between pbeam and geant to "fix" pbeam for htese studies,
so that we can get more accurate yet quick estimates of the fluxes as
a function of proton energy.
Slides from Fritz DeJongh
http://home.fnal.gov/~fritzd/files/wg1.ps
Fritz DeJongh gave a talk on the
paper
he released a few weeks ago, on his
ideas about shooting a conventional beam from fermilab to SuperK (and
eventually HyperK). The idea is to sit on the matter resonance, so with
a beam of roughly 7 or 8 GeV, you can get factors of 10 or 20 enhancement
in either neutrino OR antineutrino running (but of course not both...).
With such a big signal enhancement the backgrounds aren't so terrible, and
even with a 2.5% assumed background one can do interesting things--certainly
one can determine the mass hierarchy, but also by really measuring well
theta_13 at a long distance you can get better combined sensitivity
to maximal cp violation.
Deborah Harris
Last modified: Mon Mar 18 16:40:52 CST 2002